Microsoft says it has created machine translation that can work as well as humans

Story on Voice Recognition at Microsoft of Fil & XD on November 24, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)

Story on Voice Recognition at Microsoft of Fil & XD on November 24, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)

Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created a machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English, as well as a person.

The company says the results were verified by external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations. Researchers in the company’s Asia and U.S. labs said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, called newstest2017.

According to Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, “Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had. We just didn’t realize we’d be able to hit it so soon.”